


Teach the Stars How to Burn

by Anefi



Series: Mysterious Chunks of Space Debris [2]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:20:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23708275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anefi/pseuds/Anefi
Summary: What is Soundwave up to, in orbit around this noisy organic planet, far from the Decepticon fleet? Jazz is here to find out.
Relationships: Jazz/Soundwave, Megatron & Soundwave (Transformers)
Series: Mysterious Chunks of Space Debris [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1663726
Comments: 2
Kudos: 74





	Teach the Stars How to Burn

Jazz hadn’t meant to say anything.

It had taken decacycles to even guess the right system, and more to sneak toward the inner planets, let alone onto the ship. If Soundwave hadn’t been so deep in hiding himself, active sensors could have picked him up within a joor. Once he got close, Jazz’s own personal brand of sensor interference gave him some advantage—though he always had to watch out for sneaky cassettes. Most of them should be off the ship, but they might not be for long. So. Get in, get out, quiet as a neutrino: that was the plan. He’d evaded detection so far, but it was a high-risk mission. Insane, some might say. Luckily, that was his specialty. Some insane risks were worth taking.

The little ship that Soundwave had commandeered was barely more than a shuttle. The tiny medbay was already crowded with all the miniature specialized equipment Soundwave preferred to have on hand for the cassettes, so a cargo hold had been converted for the secret project. In a ring of crates, workstations, and bundled wires, there was an enormous, humming slab, haloed by the faint plasma glow of a stasis field.

Jazz wasn’t even surprised to find most of Megatron there, cluttering up the table, in the protection of the field. Not really. As soon as he’d realized Soundwave had jetted off on his own and taken most of his cohort with him, he’d suspected. Like the flash of warning that came too late, when the walls of a trap had already begun to close.

The mission to figure out what Soundwave was up to had brought Jazz this far, to stand in the shadows, visor dim, watching his quarry tap away on a terminal in a quiet lagoon of hums and whirs and beeping. Objective achieved. The mission wasn’t a success until he returned to the Autobots with his intel, so that was his highest priority now.

Or, it should have been.

He couldn’t quite make himself turn away.

He took in the weary slope of Soundwave’s cobalt-blue shoulders, the slight drag in the usually crisp, efficient movements, the dull red of his visor. Jazz’s mission priorities quietly reshuffled themselves below the level of conscious thought.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said.

A slight hitch in Soundwave’s steady tapping at a workstation was the only sign that he hadn’t been aware of the infiltrator all along. In other circumstances, Jazz might have gloated. Instead, he drifted closer, footsteps meandering around the organized chaos of the shuttle bay. Cataloging, not touching, in a slowly collapsing orbit around the half-assembled time bomb in the middle of the room. “You know—you guys are all alone out here. Your ship’s not in great shape. He’s in maybe the worst shape I’ve ever seen a mech who wasn’t scrap.”

Soundwave’s flaring red visor rose unerringly to meet his blue one. “Threats: ineffective.”

Jazz held up his empty hands; disarmed, as much as either of them could be. “Not threatening, my mech.” Despite his presence in this hangar, which was risk and threat in about equal measure. “I’m just here to talk.”

“Probability of stated mission as reason for presence in this sector: low,” Soundwave noted.

Jazz waved away the dry humor as if clearing a holo-scoreboard. “Okay, you caught me. I might have had a feeling that my invitation to this party had been lost in the mail. You know how I hate missing parties. FOMO, right? That’s what the Earthicans call it. Fear of missing out.”

Soundwave very deliberately avoided looking at the scrap of Megatron behind him. “Jazz: has been monitoring human transmissions.”

“Not much else to listen to out here.” Jazz’s smile couldn’t quite assert itself convincingly. “You don’t call, you don’t write….”

Soundwave said nothing. His visor followed Jazz’s indirect approach like it had a target lock.

An insistent ping from Jazz’s threat evaluation subprocesses was terminated with prejudice. He kept his motions slow, his voice even, and added a manual block. “It’s a noisy little backwater you’ve found here. Not bad, though. Some of their stuff is pretty interesting. Right? A mech could spend a vorn just catching up on the backlog.”

Soundwave tracked him with minute motions of his head, hands still raised to type, prehensile data cables primed to snap free.

“Aren’t you tired? Aren’t you tired of always fighting? Worrying about your little guys? Hasn’t it been nice to watch them just—running around a new planet? Exploring? Not getting shot at?”

The minute tip of Soundwave’s helm was—reproving, but not a disagreement. He played an old clip of Megatron’s graveled voice, like something off one of the old propaganda videos. “The struggle is the only way to ensure that our necks stay free of the Senate’s chains.”

It was only long practice that kept Jazz from flinching. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Senate is dead, mech. That happened, you know, a while ago.”

“The Prime: is not.”

“Optimus is a good leader, Soundwave. He’s not like they were.”

The ruts in that path of the argument were deep enough to crack an axle. Soundwave sidestepped it. “The Prime after him,” he demanded. “The Prime after that?”

This planet probably hadn’t even solidified a crust when Optimus ascended. Two Primes after him? Slag, just thinking about it made Jazz weary all the way down to his struts. The long, bloody future stretching pointlessly ahead, just the same as the cratered path behind, eons on useless eons. “Probably still getting blasted by the tyrant who takes over from Megatron,” he admitted; bowing to inevitability, he added, “and you.” After all, it wasn’t Megatron’s face on the faction brand. The points of Soundwave’s helm had been the sign of the Decepticons before they were Decepticons.

The slow turn of that helm as Soundwave finally looked away was just as mesmerizing as his steady gaze. Through the humming stasis field, a spindly hand rose and came to rest, infinitely gently, on a pitted grey palm scoured clean of organic growth and water damage. “We: fought our way out of the pits together. We: brought the old order to its knees. Allies: irrelevant. Resources: irrelevant. The struggle must continue.”

Jazz couldn’t look away from that damning touch. Sometimes he could almost choke on the awful futility of his life. Trapped in a sandstorm for fifty thousand blasted vorn, worn away one flaying granule at a time.

“Jazz: must not ask me to abandon him,” Soundwave said. “Do not ask me to betray my family.” It had been a long time since he’d eliminated the telling habit of curling protectively over his docks, but there was a certain tension in his cabling that betrayed the ghost of that instinct. “Your Autobots—they will never accept us. They will never let us be free.”

Jazz was powerless against the draw that brought him half a step, then another, toward the shelter of Soundwave’s side. The first hesitant brush of their fields hit him like one of Megatron’s punches, like a blast of memory, hot air in the Kaon streets the cycle before a festival, the singing charge, a half-heard melody lost to time. It shook him more than he wanted to show, so he ruthlessly tucked his feelings in close, kept the contact shallow, formal, even as he sat heavily on the edge of a crate and tore his eyes away from light fingers on death-grey plate. “I wish I knew you were wrong,” he said. He pieced his words together carefully. “And I wish I could be sure that the Cybertron he wants to build would be any better than the one we razed.”

He’d made his choice a long time ago. Most days, it wasn’t as though he regretted joining the Autobots. Not exactly. Orion had been his friend; Optimus still was, as much as he could be. But Jazz didn’t have any of the cloying nostalgia for the old regime that sometimes oozed out in the Autobot mess hall, either. He didn’t regret the rebellion. But arrayed against what some mechs might sneeringly call sympathy, there was the simple irreducible fact that Jazz and Megatron would never see eye to eye, and not just literally. Most of the other Decepticons weren’t people he wanted in charge of anything, either, but with Megatron, it was personal. Nobody who had a beef with Megatron got far in the Decepticons—at least, nobody whose name didn’t start with “S” and rhyme with “tarcream.”

Still.

One time, back in the early days, Jazz had had an open shot. Not a blaster shot—a mining frame armored for gladiatorial combat would shrug off any gun Jazz could carry—but a saboteur’s shot. He had the components. He was inside the security perimeter. It would have been quick: a recharge he would have never woken from, probably better than Megatron deserved.

It would have been an unforgivable betrayal.

So, in the right light, maybe this whole stupid war was his fault. Maybe he brought this grinding horror on himself. Maybe, some days, he reveled in it, with demonic mania the other Autobots would quail from. Maybe, on the tail end of some long missions, he felt like the persona he put on back at base was just his deepest cover yet. Maybe he thought about what it would be like if he never went back, what it would take.

None of this was anything Jazz had to say out loud.

Soundwave knew.

And he knew it was hopeless.

“Soundwave: loyal,” they said together.

With his spark churning heavy in his chest, Jazz stood up to leave. “I had to try,” he said.

As he turned away, Soundwave’s hand caught his, clawed fingers as gentle with him as they were on Megatron’s scarred armor. “The process will take some time,” he said. “Jazz: could…” he stalled out. “Jazz. Is not required to leave.”

Jazz looked into the searing red of his visor and could almost picture the optics behind it, the unhappy twist of his mouth as he summoned the courage to ask for something he needed like energon but expected to be denied. Jazz’s memory files of that face were worn soft at the edges from how often he’d replayed them in the early days of the war.

Soundwave was already turning back to Megatron, his visor dimming, when Jazz squeezed his hand to stop him. “Half an orn,” Jazz said. “Half an orn, and then I need to get back to my people.” And warn them, he didn’t have to say.

Soundwave knew.

“Ravage: will accompany you.”

“Don’t push your luck.” Jazz would have to check for stowaways. Thoroughly.

“Half an orn,” Soundwave said, instead of arguing, in what most mechs would have called a monotone. Jazz, however, had the most sensitive sensory equipment in half a galaxy, and old, lovingly detailed interpretation protocols attuned specifically to every subtle vibration of the mech beside him. To him, the statement was as deep as an ocean, as turbulent, as rich. If he wasn’t careful, he could lose himself in a promise like that.

Some risks were always worth taking.

**Author's Note:**

> My beta reader REALLY wanted a cameo by Jeremy Wade in a detention cell, but sorry, no.
> 
> Leave a kudos or a comment if there was anything you liked! I am also [on tumblr as anefi](https://anefi.tumblr.com/); come say hi, or leave a prompt.


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